He rose, bringing her to her feet, and stood before her ready to go or stay as she should choose, heaping up before her with an air of gently ironic challenge, the burden of responsibility; silently offering her one of his borrowed summaries, some irrelevant and philosophic worldly wisdom. But it was what he felt. There was something he feared. Alone, he would not have initiated this scene. She faltered, driven back and disarmed by the shock of an overwhelming pity … unexpected terrible challenge from within, known to no one, to be accepted or flouted on her sole eternal responsibility. … In a torture of acceptance she pressed through it and returned remorseless to her place, flooded as she moved by a sudden knowing of wealth within herself now being strangely quarried.
The long moment was ending; into its void she saw the seemings of her grown life pass and disappear. His solid motionless form, near and equal in the twilight, grew faint, towered above her, immense and invisible in a swift gathering swirling darkness bringing him nearer than sight or touch. The edges of things along the margin of her sight stood for an instant sharply clear and disappeared leaving her faced only with the swirling darkness shot now with darting flame. She ceased to care what thoughts might be occupying him, and exulted in the marvel. Here already rewarding her insistence, was payment in royal coin. She was at last, in person, on a known highway, as others, knowing truth alive. She stared expostulation as she recognised the celebrated nature of her experience, hearing her own familiar voice as on a journey, in amazed expostulation at the absence everywhere of simple expression of the quality of the state … a voyage, swift and transforming, a sense of passing in the midst of this marvel of flame-lit darkness, out of the world in glad solitary confidence with wildly, calmly beating morning heart.
The encircling darkness grew still, spread wide about her; the moving flames drew together to a single glowing core. The sense of his presence returned in might. The rosy-hearted core of flame was within him, within the invisible substance of his breast. Tenderly transforming his intangible expansion to the familiar image of the man who knew her thoughts she moved to find him and marvel with him.
His voice budded gently, but with the same quality that had flung her back solid and alone into the cold gloom.
“We must consider” … what did he think had happened? He had kissed a foreign woman. Who did he think was hearing him? … “what you would do under certain circumstances.” The last words came trembling, and he sat down clearly visible in the restored blue twilight; waiting with willing permanence for her words.
“I should do nothing at all, under any circumstances.”
“Do not forget that I am Jew.”
Looking at him with the eyes of her friends Miriam saw the Russian, standing free, beyond Europe, from the stigma of “foreigner.” Many people would think, as she had in the beginning, that he was an intellectual Frenchman, different to the usual “Frenchman”; a big-minded cosmopolitan at any rate; a proud possession. The mysterious fact of Jewishness could remain in the background … the hidden flaw … as there was always a hidden flaw in all her possessions. To her, and to her adventure, its first step now so far away, an accepted misery powerless to arrest the swift rush of the transforming moments, it need make no difference.
“Perhaps it shall be better I should go away.”
Where? Into the world of people, who would seem to him not different to herself, see his marvellous surrendered charm, catch him, without knowing who or what he was. Who else could know “Mr. Shatov”?
“Do you want to go away?”
“I do not. But it must be with you to decide.”
“I don’t see why you should go away.”
“Then I shall stay. And we shall see.”
The summer lay ahead, unaltered; the threat of change gone from their intercourse. Tomorrow they would take up life again with a stability; years at their disposal. The need for the moment was to have him out of sight, kill the past hour and return to the idea of him, already keeping her standing, with relaxed power of attention to his little actual pitiful obstructive form, in an independent glow, an easy wealth of assurance towards life whose thronging images, mysteries of cities and crowds, single fixed groups of known places and inexorable people were alight and welcoming with the sense of him. She bade him a
